When you’re the only QA, how do you instill quality practices and build that mindset into the wider company? I'm going to walk through how we went from eight to forty-five quality advocates, and talk about recruiting, training, fun, multiple remote offices, delegation, velociraptor-avoidance techniques, staffing, blood, sweat, and tea. I’ll share the potholes we fell into so you can fall in different ones, and build a practice of awesome testers.

Building a QA practice requires buy-in from management and developers, and can mean changing the process to include up-front quality advocacy, instead of end-of-the-line quality control. Quality starts before the project is sold to the stakeholders, and it doesn't end until after the product is in the hands of the end users. Growing a practice means finding the right people to work with, and communicating well with clients, users, sales, management, and developers.